One you can trace back to the first X-Men and Spider-Man movies, and then confirmed by a half-dozen movies since then and Disney's acquistion of Marvel. Nine years of consistent success of superhero films does not constitute as 'very recent' here.

If something's big and you cash in on a trend, you are not taking a risk. I do not see what is so hard to understand about that sentence. The Hunger Games in adapting a bestselling YA novel series (after the successes of Harry Potter and Twilight) was also not a gamble.

If Disney messes up with Star Wars VII, the brand is in trouble.

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That's true. The difference between Star Wars and Marvel is that with Marvel, Disney picked up a multi-film franchise already in production and with one proven hit, Iron Man. Star Wars has been a consistently successful film franchise (financially), but both the original and prequel trilogies have been wrapped up so this is a fresh venture for the franchise.

There's been talk about whether the new trilogy will fit in with the EU or not, but I wonder what will happen to EU continuity it the movies are made out of line with them.

New books will have to tie in with the changes of the movies, and they may not be able to simply retcon certain things like they did with the Clone Wars. I mean, if there's no Mara Jade, different or no Solo kids, no Academy on Yavin IV, then you can't keep writing books where those things have happened.

So are we about to see a reboot of the post-Return of the Jedi books as well? I think so.

This could get especially weird because first we had books that continued the Star Wars universe with no knowledge of the prequels. Then we had books that did have knowledge of the prequels and began to tie the two eras together (that living planet from NJO, Vergere, Outbound Flight, among other elements), trying to keep the illusion on one big continuity. These included Clone Wars era books that always felt slightly out of step with those post-ROTJ. Now the Clone Wars era books will be able to stay in a reboot, but the post-ROTJ ones would have to start again. So will fans of the books get a decent ending to stories about Jaina and whoever else they haven't killed off yet from that continuity?

I'm a huge EU fan, I still love the novels, but I wouldn't be entirely averse to rebooting the post-ROTJ continuity. As long as it's very different and not just a loose retread. Besides at this point, they're pretty old, so they could do one last finale story that kills the Big Three and then start over.

Having never read a word of the EU couldn't care less, though I appreciate others do. Passionately even. But when it comes to the movies, the one thing we might be guaranteed is that there will be continuity errors.

They should reboot it. The Clone Wars show over ruled any the books and comics about the same period of time. There is a great opportunity to do animation in the time period between the OT and the ST. Any adaptation would never be exact any ways. Any book made into a movie never is. They might use some of their ideas but never be literal copies of the source material.

Would you like to see Luke still wear his Black glove from Jedi in the sequels? He should have been able to get the artificial skin repaired. But I like the idea of him wearing by choice. As a memory of his father and warning to never take the same path he did.

Having never read a word of the EU couldn't care less, though I appreciate others do. Passionately even. But when it comes to the movies, the one thing we might be guaranteed is that there will be continuity errors.

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Yeah, I haven't read it since the NJO, and don't have a particular attachment to keeping that continuity either. I do know that there's some one-off book coming out that's supposedly about the Big Three and their "greatest adventure yet" or something like that. I wonder now if it was conceived as one final story before everything starts again.

There is a lot of overlap between Retcon and Reboot. A lot of times there is not much difference.

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"Retcon" means "retroactive continuity", which happens when you insert facts and character retroactively in the franchise's past as if they had always been there. A reboot means that you completely erase all continuity and start again with a new one. I don't think there's a lot of overlap between those two concepts.

Ummm with Star Wars the films have always stayed the constant core. But the material in the books and the comics has been reshaped all the time. Lets not forget these are just fan terms. The huge amount of "retroactive continuity" done with SW stuff would be called a reboot anywhere else. What they need to do to fit all these inconsistencies together is very similar to what DC comics does. They reboot some stuff fully and keep other stuff. So the word "retcon" is used to explain how it can fit.

The point is in order to understand how Zahn's version of the Clone Wars fit with the real versions movies you have to track down magazine articles and other books that later written later . The new movies are going to largely be aimed at people who have seen the first 6 episodes only! You got to wonder if at some point Lucasfilm is going to want to open Star Wars tie in books to everyone. Not a small group which have studied everything published for 35 years so they alone can understand how it all fits together.

When Disney bought SW they also bought the thousands of characters and worlds from the EU. It's a point that the CEO of Disney, Bob Iger himself even noted. Rebooting it flushes all of it down the drain and I don't see Disney doing that anymore than them going for a reboot of the Marvel Comics Shared Universe. It's counterproductive to their goal and creates a net loss of intellectual properties.

Marvel has managed to do it without having a need to reboot the shared universe of the comic book. That at least shows that maximal utilization of the intellectual properties purchased by Disney doesn't require a reboot imo. Rather I think pushing new talent and respecting the stuff that has come previously will help pave the way forward.

I, for one, won't be happy unless all on screen material is respected. I want to see a reference to the dynamic history created from both Ewok movies, the Droids cartoon, and most importantly, the Christmas special.

I, for one, won't be happy unless all on screen material is respected. I want to see a reference to the dynamic history created from both Ewok movies, the Droids cartoon, and most importantly, the Christmas special.

I, for one, won't be happy unless all on screen material is respected. I want to see a reference to the dynamic history created from both Ewok movies, the Droids cartoon, and most importantly, the Christmas special.

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It's a shame then that Bea Arthur is dead.

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Disney also bought ILM so bringing her back should not be much of a problem.